by Dan Simmons
“But Mallory’s expedition which Percy joined had dozens of men with them,” says Lady Bromley. “More than a score of white men, I believe, and hundreds of porters and more hundreds of pack animals. I remember Percy writing and complaining from the plantation about their plan to use Tibetan army mules, which he said were all but impossible to manage. And Colonel Norton described to me how slow the process was of establishing one camp after the other, first on the glacier, then up onto that icy ridge between Everest and its neighboring summit—I studied my geography of the mountain, gentlemen, oh, how I studied it—with the white climbers cutting steps for the porters every few feet of the way up the initial ice wall of that ridge, the North Col. It takes that many men weeks upon weeks of slow ascent. How on earth could the three of you succeed—not in summiting the mountain, which is not my interest in this expedition, but in getting high enough to Camps Five and Six to look for my son?”
It’s Jean-Claude who answers. “Lady Bromley, we shall climb very quickly, alpine style rather than this military assault style that all of the Mallory expeditions used. We shall hire only a few Sherpas to act as porters, including high-climbing porters—perhaps finding these good men at your tea plantation with the help of Percy’s cousin Reggie—but from the time we reach the actual mountain, speed and efficiency will be our constant goals. We shall climb, sleep, and eat alpine style—often taking our bivouac gear with us in our rucksacks, not worrying about a series of established camps—and we should be able to carry out a comprehensive search from Camp Four on the North Col all the way to and above Camp Six within a week or two…rather than the five to ten weeks it takes to get that far with a huge expedition such as General Bruce’s.”
Lady Bromley looks at the three of us, and then steadily at the Deacon. Her gaze has suddenly gone…not cold, exactly, but distant, businesslike. “How much will this rescue…recovery…expedition cost, gentlemen?”
The Deacon answers, and his voice is as businesslike as Lady Bromley’s. “The Alpine Club set aside ten thousand pounds for the entirety of the first two attempts—the nineteen twenty-one reconnaissance and the nineteen twenty-two serious attempt on the mountain. Their estimate was that the reconnaissance would cost only three thousand pounds, the actual climbing attempt in ’twenty-two using up the rest of the ten thousand pounds. But they went over budget on both. And this year’s climb—the nineteen twenty-four climb on which your son, Mallory, and Irvine were lost—cost them almost twelve thousand pounds.”
Lady Bromley’s no-nonsense gaze never leaves the Deacon’s face now.
“So you are asking me for twelve thousand pounds to attempt this…recovery…expedition to seek out my son?”
“No, ma’am,” says the Deacon. “With just the three of us and perhaps two dozen good Sherpa climbing porters, everything—including steamship transportation to Calcutta, tents, climbing gear, including oxygen rigs such as Finch designed and Sandy Irvine refined for the last expedition, plus the rental of some horses and pack mules to get us and the gear to Everest Base Camp—I estimate the total cost of this recovery expedition at being no more than twenty-five hundred pounds.”
Lady Bromley blinks her surprise at the low figure. I confess that it does not sound low to me.
“We’re professional alpine climbers, ma’am,” the Deacon says, leaning closer to the woman in black. “We climb fast and through all weather, we eat light, we sleep in canvas bags tied to the mountainside by a rope or—failing that—sit out the night on a narrow ledge with a lit candle under our chins to keep us from nodding off.”
Lady Bromley looks at all three of us and returns her gaze to the Deacon. She remains silent.
“Lady Bromley,” says the Deacon, “as you mentioned, Norton and Mallory’s expedition which your son followed to Everest carried tons upon tons of supplies. The Army and Navy Co-operative Society alone added sixty tins of quail foie gras, three hundred one-pound Hunter hams, and four dozen bottles of Montebello champagne. You must understand that this will not be our kind of expedition—three expert alpine climbers, moving quickly, knowing in which places to look for your son, and capable of getting high up on the mountain quickly, doing that job, and getting out.”
It is a long speech for the Deacon, and I’m not sure if it has convinced Lady Bromley until she finally speaks.
“I will provide three thousand pounds for your expedition,” she says softly. “But there will be one condition.”
We wait.
“I want a member of the family along,” says Lady Bromley in a tone I haven’t heard from her before. It’s almost royal in its there-will-be-no-argument-about-this, soft but infinitely certain finality. “Percy’s cousin Reggie has climbed in the Alps—with Percy and many of the excellent guides I mentioned earlier—and is fully capable of going with you at least to the lower reaches of Mount Everest, perhaps all the way to Camp Three or whatever high camp you number up on that icy ridge between the mountains. You will, of course, make all climbing decisions, Dickie, but Reggie will be in charge of the overall expedition, of disbursing funds—to the Sherpas, to the yak sellers at Kampa Dzong—whatever is required. And Cousin Reggie will keep track of every receipt, every pound spent, every farthing. Agreed?”
The Deacon turns to look at Jean-Claude and me and I can read his mind. Having another Percy-type amateur along…it will probably slow us down, possibly put us in dangerous situations if we have to rescue him on the glacier or North Col ice face. But Lady Bromley’s tone has been clear enough: no Cousin Reggie, no expedition. And this “Cousin Reggie” obviously won’t be doing any of the truly high climbing with us.
“Yes, ma’am, we agree,” says the Deacon. “We will be delighted to travel with Percy’s cousin Reggie. It frees me from keeping track of expenses, a task at which I confess to be terrible.”
Lady Bromley stands suddenly, and the three of us quickly get to our feet. She shakes the Deacon’s hand, then Jean-Claude’s, and finally mine. I see tears filling her dark eyes, but she does not allow them to fall.
“How long…,” she begins.
“We should have the expedition completed and our complete report back to you by midsummer of next year,” says the Deacon. “I’m bringing a small camera, but I promise that we’ll retrieve anything that we can…Lord Percival’s personal possessions, clothing, letters…”
“If he is dead,” Lady Bromley interrupts in a totally flat tone, “I believe he would have preferred to be buried there on the mountain. But I would so much appreciate a few of the tokens of remembrance you’ve mentioned and…as hard as it will be to look at them…photographs.”
We all nod. I feel absurdly close to weeping myself. I also feel very guilty. And exhilarated.
“If my Percy is alive,” says Lady Bromley, standing straighter and taller than ever, “I want you to bring him home to me.”
And without another word, she turns and leaves the room through the secret door in the library wall.
It takes a few seconds to realize that we’ve been dismissed and also that the Deacon got us exactly what he’d promised—a funded three-man (and one accountant now) alpine-style expedition to climb Mount Everest. If we find poor Percy’s body, all the better. If not, the tallest mountain on Planet Earth may well be ours to summit.
There’s a quiet cough, and we turn to find old Harrison, the butler, standing near the far door, ready to lead us back through the hallways and then the impossibly huge library and then more hallways and the Heaven Room and the foyers and God knows what else to the front door and freedom.
The carriage ride to the entrance of the estate seems endless. Benson, the walrus-mustachioed driver, says nothing, and we three in the carriage do not speak. But our emotions surge around us.
Benson drops us off at the white gravel chauffeured-car park, empty except for our coupe parked under nearby trees, and still we do not speak.
Suddenly Jean-Claude runs at the endless expanse of trimmed grass beyond the gravel, whoops loudly, and doe
s a perfect four-circle cartwheel. The Deacon and I laugh and grin at each other like the pleased idiots we are at this moment.
But as we drive away, one thought keeps seeping through my joy and anticipation of this impossible expedition: there at the center of perhaps the most beautiful 9,400 acres in the world resides a permanently broken heart and an eternally damaged mind.
Can we bring some peace to her? It is the first time in all our planning—our “conniving,” as I’ve thought of it—that this question has entered my mind. I realize it should have been the first thing I’d thought of when we started discussing this impossible-to-believe-in three-man Everest expedition.
Can we bring Lady Bromley some peace of mind?
Riding in the open air in a beautiful English summer afternoon, with the shadows just beginning to lengthen across the fields and empty highway, I decide that perhaps we can—can do this climb the right way, can find the remains of Percy Bromley, and can bring back something, anything, from that mountain of death that will…will what? Not heal Lady Bromley’s broken heart, for she’s soon to lose her older son to the endless effects of mustard gas dropped on him eight years ago by British shells, and her younger son is lost forever on Mount Everest, but perhaps we can quiet her mind about the details, the reality, of Lord Percival Bromley’s senseless death on this particular mountain.
Perhaps.
The Deacon is grinning as he drives, and Jean-Claude is grinning as he rides in the front passenger seat, his head cocked to one side to catch the wind like a dog, and I decide to join them both in grinning.
We have absolutely no concept of what lies ahead for us.
Chapter 3
If we can find the remains of Lord Percival, we can certainly find Mallory or Irvine…or both of them.
T here are many memorial services for Mallory and Irvine in that late summer and autumn of 1924, but perhaps the most important one is held at Saint Paul’s Cathedral on October 17. It is essentially an invitation-only memorial service, and from our group, only the Deacon is invited to attend. He does so and says little about it to us afterward, but the London newspapers are filled with the eulogy by the Bishop of Chester. The bishop ends with an adaptation of King David’s lament from the Bible—“Delightful and very pleasant were George Mallory and Andrew Irvine; in life, in death, they were not parted.”
Jean-Claude points out to me the next day that if—as was probably the case—one of them fell first on their way up or down the mountain, they were certainly parted in their last minutes or hours.
The deaths of Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer are mentioned only in the abstract during the bishop’s eulogy for Mallory and Irvine—“as we remember others who also perished on the mountain that month”—and Lady Bromley holds no memorial service for her son that summer or autumn (perhaps because she still believes he is alive somewhere on Mount Everest or the Rongbuk Glacier below and truly does believe that the three of us will find and rescue him a year after he disappeared). Lady Bromley has urged the Deacon to start the expedition this very autumn of 1924 and to attempt the Everest “rescue” in winter, but he assured her that both the mountain and access routes to the mountain are impassable and unclimbable in the Himalayan winter. Deep within her, Lady Bromley—even through her shock and temporary mental instability—knows that our expedition the next spring and summer of 1925 will be, at best, a recovery attempt, not a rescue effort.
That same evening of October 17 there is held an assembly related to Mallory and Irvine which the Deacon does get J.C. and me into, despite its being so crowded that the group has to rent the Royal Albert Hall for the occasion. The Royal Geographical Society and its Alpine Club are holding their joint meeting “to Receive the Reports from the Mount Everest Expedition of 1924.” To say that the crowd—mostly of climbers and a mob of reporters—is enthusiastically interested would be an understatement.
The finale of the program is the reading of the report from the photographer-climber-geologist Noel Odell—who many believe should have been Mallory’s partner in that final summit attempt rather than young Andrew Irvine—and it tells of Odell’s efforts to wait for the missing climbers at their high camp and his final sighting of them from his point between Camps IV and V when the clouds parted briefly, although Odell seems confused at times as to whether he saw the “two, moving black dots” on a snowfield above the First Step along the North East Ridge, above the Second Step, or even possibly above the lesser Third Step and on the “pyramid of snowfields” approaching the summit itself.
“The question remains,” Odell wrote in his report, “has Mount Everest been climbed? It must be left Unanswered, for there is no direct evidence. But bearing in mind all the circumstances…and considering their position when last seen, I think there is a strong probability that Mallory and Irvine succeeded. At that I must leave it.”
This causes a low murmuring and susurration in the crowd of England’s best climbers. Many of the men—even some of Mallory’s and Irvine’s other climbing partners on the expedition—do not believe the evidence suggests that the two men had summited. Even if Odell’s sighting was real and Mallory and Irvine had somehow climbed the ominous Second Step, it was too late in the day for a successful summit attempt—they would have had to descend in the dark—and their oxygen canisters must have been on or near empty at such a late hour. So it is the opinion of most of the world-class climbers in the Albert Hall this night that Mallory and Irvine had pressed on too far, too late, had attempted to descend in the dark—probably well before getting anywhere near the summit—and both had fallen to their deaths on the North Face in the dark and windy lunar-cold night somewhere there above 27,000 feet, and possibly in the unbreathable Martian-thin air around 28,000 feet.
But I remember that Odell’s report caused a powerful wave of opposition when he ended his communiqué with his belief that the two men had died of exposure.
“Exposure” simply wasn’t a noble enough death for these two national heroes, these mere men who were quickly turning into an English legend, but even foreign climbers who’d known and climbed with Mallory—men immune from the patriotic fervor filling the Albert Hall this mid-October night—don’t believe that he, or even Sandy Irvine, for that matter, was so foolish as to die of exposure. Most of the climbers we listen to after the meeting guess that one of the two missing men—almost certainly Irvine—fell, probably on the return from the summit or their high point that evening before the sun set, perhaps in the darkness, possibly on the North Face itself in their effort to get out of the howling winds, and, in falling, pulled the other climber off his perch to his death.
Even the official leader of the fatal 1924 expedition, Edward “Teddy” Norton, had written from Base Camp, “I am very sorry Odell put that bit about their dying of exposure in his communiqué.” And he’d added, to the Mount Everest Committee, “All the rest of us are agreed it is any odds on a fall-off.”
On our walk back to the hotel late that October night after the Alpine Club meeting, Jean-Claude asks the Deacon, “Ree-shard, do you think Mallory and Irvine reached the summit?”
“I have no idea,” says the Deacon around the stem of his pipe. The fragrance of his tobacco leaves a scent trail in the cold, damp air as we hurry along.
“Do you believe they died of exposure?” persists J.C. “Or fell?”
The Deacon removes the pipe and looks at us, his gray eyes bright in the light from the corner streetlamp. “There simply isn’t enough public or Alpine Journal information from Odell or anyone else who was there to make a judgment about how or where they died. The three of us need to talk to Norton, John Noel, Odell, Dr. Somervell, and other friends of mine who were on last spring’s expedition. Then we’ll have to go to Germany—to Munich—to talk to this climber Bruno Sigl, who says he was high enough on the lower parts of Everest to see the avalanche he says carried Bromley and the mysterious Austrian or German, Meyer, away. Don’t you agree?”
Jean-Claude and I look at each o
ther. I can see in his eyes that J.C. will never travel to Germany with the Deacon and me. The Germans killed three of his brothers, and he swore long ago never to cross that border into Deutschland.
“I know, Jean-Claude,” says the Deacon even though J.C. hasn’t said a word. “I understand. Jake and I can go to Munich next month—November—and report to you later what this Sigl person says about the death of Lord Percival and that other man, Meyer, as well as give us any details he has about the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine. But do stay in London long enough to visit Norton and the others with us.”
“What if this Sigl fellow doesn’t have any details about anything?” I say almost plaintively. “What if you and I waste time going to Munich next month and learn nothing new about Mallory and Irvine or—more important to our mission—about what happened to Percival Bromley?”
“Well,” says the Deacon with a smile that looks almost hungry, “then we’ll just have to go to Everest next March through June and find out for ourselves what happened to them. If we can find the remains of Lord Percival, we can certainly find Mallory or Irvine…or both of them. The dry winds of Mount Everest desiccate and mummify a corpse far more efficiently than could the high priests of ancient Egypt.”
Chapter 4
The ponies had been shot in the head.